I caught sight of Olivia, standing aside from the crowd. She looked oddly disengaged as if she had been hypnotized. Someone waved a placard behind Roger Lake’s head that declared firmly INSURRECTION IS AN ART AND LIKE ALL ARTS IT HAS LAWS which I thought had probably been dreamt up by Heather, but Olivia said, ‘No, Trotsky, actually.’

‘What’s going on?’ I asked her.

‘I think Roger’s advocating overthrowing the establishment,’ she said, looking rather weary, ‘and setting up a “University of the Street” or something in its place.’

‘The street? I thought we were protesting about the war? Or is it the government?’

Olivia shrugged indifferently and then – in an exemplary non sequitur – said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Her skin was like milk.

‘I’m sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Or congratulations? Whichever.’

‘Yeah,’ she said ambivalently.

Roger shouted something that seemed to agitate his cohorts and Olivia said, ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you?’

‘Me?’ But at that moment Robin bounded up, wearing red corduroy dungarees and a blue and white striped long-sleeved T-shirt, as if he was about to present Playschool. He had pinned a small shield-shaped badge onto one of his dungaree straps. The badge said ‘School Prefect’.

‘It’s an ironic comment on the nature of power,’ he said when I asked him if he actually had been a school prefect.

‘Catch you later,’ Olivia said to me and disappeared into the throng.

‘This is real,’ Robin exclaimed heatedly; ‘this is important stuff.’

‘I didn’t know Buddhists were into politics,’ I said.

‘Buddhists?’

‘You were a Buddhist yesterday,’ I pointed out to him.

‘Yeah, well maybe I’m a Maoist today. You know nothing,’ he added. Which was true.

I spotted Shug and Bob strolling through the mêlée of bodies.

‘Anarchy rules,’ Shug said laconically. Bob had a brown paper poke in his hand from which he was eating magic mushrooms as if they were lemon drops. He offered one to Robin.

‘Your sort doesn’t have any kind of commitment to anything, do you?’ Robin said, cramming a handful of psilocybin into his mouth. ‘You’re just lazy hedonists, all you care about is your own little lives.’

‘He’s been politicized,’ I explained to Bob and Shug.

‘Wow,’ Bob said, ‘did it hurt?’

Heather appeared at Robin’s side. ‘Direct action,’ she said, nipples joggling feverishly, ‘it’s the only way we can make anything change.’

‘Too right,’ Robin said.

‘You’re so full of shite,’ Shug said, rather concisely, I thought.

‘Come the revolution,’ Heather spat, ‘you and your kind will be first against the wall.’ Robespierre, Stalin, Heather – the line of descent was clear. She embarked on a polemical rant about how students were going to run the world and something I didn’t quite grasp about the local Timex and Sunblest workers taking over the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (which might be a good thing).

‘I thought this was about Vietnam? Or the miners?’ I puzzled.

Robin sighed at my lack of enlightenment. ‘It’s about everything.’

‘Everything? That’s a lot of stuff.’

‘You sound like your boyfriend,’ Robin said petulantly.

Bob gave me a perplexed look.

‘That’s you,’ I explained.

‘We’re having an uprising,’ Robin said. ‘We don’t need frivolous people like you lot.’

‘Nor fifth columnists,’ Heather added, looking at me menacingly.

None of this was doing my headache any good. Added to which, my limbs had begun to ache and my tonsils felt as if someone had sandpapered them.

Bob and Shug declared they were going to ‘hang out’ and see what happened, but I fought my way through the flux and spill and out into the corridor, hoping that I wouldn’t encounter Maggie Mackenzie.

As if the very thought of her very name had conjured her up, I suddenly heard her strident tones and dodged into the female toilets.

Where I found Terri. She was sitting on the ledge in front of the mirrors in the company of a surprise new dog. Silky-sleek and very elegant, it was clearly a pedigree of some kind and was an infinitely more sophisticated representative of dogdom than the elusive yellow dog Chick had run over. The new dog was sharing a packet of dog chocolate drops with Terri – one for the dog, one for Terri, and so on. The dog took the chocolate drops from Terri’s upturned palm like a fastidious horse.

‘Meet Hank,’ Terri said proudly, as if she’d just given birth. ‘I found him,’ she said, rubbing the dog’s wet nose with her own slightly dryer one. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ The dog regarded me, rather mournfully, with a pair of beautiful sea-green eyes. A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘What breed do you call that?’ I asked her.

‘Jesus, you’re ignorant – it’s a Weimaraner, of course.’

‘I had a feeling it might be.’ Somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to spoil her new-found happiness by telling her about Hank’s suspect provenance, for who else could this be if not Buddy? Terri had tied a piece of clothes-line around the dog’s neck and now stood up and gave it a gentle tug. ‘We’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘We need to get stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Yeah – dog stuff.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No, it’s OK.’ Terri jumped down from the ledge, the dog following her like a shadow, and set off purposefully, an adverb I had never seen her utilize before. She’d even removed her Ray-Bans. Perhaps there was still an all-American girl lurking under that Lamian carapace, a cheerful, resourceful college kid (a babysitting, prom-queen type). One who didn’t seem to need me any more.

Could I really be replaced so easily, I wondered as I left the toilets and wandered out into the corridor. And by a dog at that? Perhaps that was the answer to my problem with Bob – I could get him a dog as a substitute for me. And a dog would surely treat him better than I did. It might not cook, but it wouldn’t judge.

I was so caught up in this idea – I’d got as far as picturing Bob in the company of a cheerful Border terrier that could do simple household tasks – that I failed to notice Maggie Mackenzie barrelling along through the Murk again and collided with her full on. I was winded but she appeared unmoved.

‘Miss Andrews,’ she said stiffly, ‘I will extend my deadline for you as you are so incompetent. You have until ten o’clock on the day after tomorrow.’

My brain felt so addled that I could barely work out what that meant.

‘If your George Eliot essay doesn’t appear at the allotted time I shall have to inform the Dean that you are no longer eligible to sit your degree.’

I made my excuses. I finally found Olivia in the cafeteria queue, trying to juggle a tray of food with the unwieldy body of Proteus and a newfangled McLaren buggy, striped in blue and white and folded up like an umbrella. I offered to take the tray and she said, ‘Thanks,’ and handed me Proteus instead. He had an angry red teething rash on his cheeks and one small boxer’s fist jammed in his mouth as if he was trying to eat himself.

‘You haven’t seen Kara, have you?’ Olivia asked. ‘Only she asked me to hold him for a minute and that was ages ago.’

‘No, sorry.’

She was loading up her tray with cartons of milk and assorted Kellogg’s Variety Packs. ‘Do you think he can eat these?’ she asked me. ‘They don’t have any baby food in the Union.’

We found a space at the corner of a table. Olivia sat Proteus on her knee and we tried pushing spoonfuls of cereal in his mouth, an idea which he seemed to find alarming and exciting at the same time. Every time the spoon approached him he opened his mouth like a giant baby bird and then went into a kind of delirious spasm, throwing his arms and legs out and squawking at the novelty of it all. Occasionally he spat out Ricicles or Coco Pops like grapeshot. ‘I’m sure it’s time he was weaned anyway,’ Olivia said, rather sheepishly.

‘Is that what we’re doing?’ I really did know nothing.

‘Roger wants me to have the baby,’ Olivia said.

‘The baby?’ I repeated, confused. I had forgotten she was pregnant and for a moment thought she was talking about Proteus.

‘He says I can move in with him and Sheila.’ She shook her head in amazement. ‘Can you imagine?’

I couldn’t. ‘Does Sheila know?’

‘No. It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m going to have an abortion.’

‘Are you sure? I mean, you’re really good with babies.’

‘I think it’s wrong to bring babies into this awful world,’ she said sadly. ‘I mean, all you would want would be for them to be happy and that’s the one thing that people aren’t, isn’t it? I couldn’t bear the idea of knowing that my child was unhappy. Or that when they’re old – a helpless old man, or a little old lady – you wouldn’t be there to look after them because you’d be dead by then.’ I wished I could think of something cheerful to say in response to this rather tragic outburst but at that moment Proteus gave a fractious cry and we both stared at him as if he might hold a key to some mystery, but he had jammed his fist back in his mouth and looked on the verge of tears.

‘He’s burning up, poor lamb,’ Olivia said, putting one of her cool, pale hands on his forehead. ‘I’d better take him out of here.’ The Union was full of noise and smoke which probably wasn’t good for a baby and certainly wasn’t good for me so I followed her out.

‘Thanks, anyway,’ Olivia said, ‘you’re a real friend,’ which made me feel suddenly guilty because I didn’t really think of us as friends.

‘See you,’ she said.

‘Yes to both questions. Come on, we’ll be late.’

A feeble shout directed us to the slight figure of Professor Cousins, trotting towards us along the pavement as fast as he could. ‘Hello there,’ he gasped. I sat him down on a bench at Seabraes to recover and we contemplated the view of the railway goods yards and the Tay (which today was dull pewter) until he got his breath back.

‘We have to go,’ Maisie said.

‘It’s Dr Lake’s daughter, isn’t it?’ Professor Cousins said to her. He started clicking his fingers. ‘No, don’t tell me, the name will come to me in a minute.’ He twisted his whole body in an outlandish effort to remember.

‘You mean Lucy,’ Maisie said.

‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed.

‘We’re going to be late,’ Maisie said, growing more impatient.

‘Are we going somewhere nice?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully.

‘No.’

‘She is dead, trust me,’ I hissed, remembering Chick’s macabre penknife test.

‘Dear Lucy,’ Professor Cousins said affectionately, ‘she’s quite the little ghoul, isn’t she?’

Mrs McCue, at whose invitation Maisie was present, although heaven knows why – some kind of initiation rite into womanhood, probably – put a restraining hand on the bony shoulder of her granddaughter who, in her enthusiasm, looked to be in danger of falling into the open grave. Mrs McCue was wearing her funeral hat – black felt with a brim – that she had tied onto her head with a Rainmate.

Professor Cousins gave Chick a cheery wave. He seemed to be enjoying himself. There were quite a few other mourners, considering that Miss Anderson was supposedly a crabbit wee wifie. Mrs Macbeth, naturally, had accompanied Mrs McCue along with a minibus of Anchorage residents.

‘Like a day-trip in a charabanc,’ Mrs McCue said disapprovingly. ‘It’s not as if any of them liked her.’

‘Neither did you,’ Mrs Macbeth reminded her.

There was a small knot of relatives of the deceased who, unlike the residents of The Anchorage – all of whom were clearly veteran funeral-goers – did not possess mourning outfits and were self-consciously attired in plums and greys and navy blues. Some of them dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs, others stared very seriously at the coffin lid. They all had the awkward look of over-rehearsed actors.

‘Close family,’ Mrs McCue scoffed, ‘close not being the word I would choose. They weren’t bothered about her when she was alive, I don’t know why they’re concerned now she’s dead.’ Mrs McCue seemed to have taken it on herself to recite the usual obsequial platitudes.

The rain was beginning to take itself seriously now and Professor Cousins opened up his duck-head handled umbrella (try saying that quickly) and gathered Maisie and myself beneath it.

Janice Rand had also remembered an old person, but only just, as she arrived rather late and breathless, but nonetheless had a spiritually superior air about her as if she was personally despatching Miss Anderson to her maker.

A sudden gust of wind lifted Professor Cousins off his feet so that I had to reach out and grab his arm to stop him being blown away. That was when I felt the eyes on my back (‘Surely not?’ Professor Cousins said, looking alarmed). My watcher had returned, it seemed. She was standing amongst the old graves of the cemetery, up on the hill, solemnly watching the funeral, like an outcast mourner or an unnoticed ghost. She was partially obscured by the umbrella she was holding but the red coat flared like a signal. This, surely, must be the person whom I felt dogging my footsteps at every turn – or did her life take her to the same unlikely places as mine did? Or perhaps I was being followed by two people – one I could see and one I couldn’t.

My attention was diverted when Mrs McCue threw a handful of claggy soil onto the coffin lid, where it hit with a thud that made Professor Cousins wince (Maisie executed the clawing gesture again for my benefit), and when I looked again the woman had gone.

‘Well, I dinnae ken about you,’ Mrs Macbeth said as everyone started turning their backs on Miss Anderson, ‘but I could do with a nice cuppie.’ Mrs McCue rested on the ground a raffia shopping-basket that she was carrying. On the side of it the words ‘A Present From Majorca’ were worked in different-coloured raffia. It looked as though it weighed a ton and seemed to quiver every so often. An off-white ear poked out of one corner.

‘Janet,’ Mrs Macbeth whispered, ‘aff her legs again.’

‘Achtung,’ Mrs McCue whispered as a tall, slim woman approached, ‘mein Führer’s here.’

Mrs Macbeth parked her Zimmer in front of the shopping-bag while Mrs McCue translated for me. ‘The matron – Mrs Dalzell.’

Mrs Dalzell had an encouraging, Mary Poppins kind of demeanour and indeed she had the same hairstyle as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (or indeed most of her films) and was progressing rather regally around the graveside, checking on everyone’s happiness or lack of it and inviting the relatives back to The Anchorage for ‘a small tea’.

Unnoticed by Mrs Dalzell, Janet had escaped her shopping-basket and was now making a beeline for Miss Anderson. Mrs Dalzell’s Mary Poppins smile slipped slightly when she saw the dog. ‘Whose dog is that?’ she barked, looking round enquiringly at her charges. Janet had begun to dig furiously at the side of the grave, trying to cover the coffin with earth. ‘It’s your dog, isn’t it?’ Mrs Dalzell said accusingly to Mrs Macbeth. ‘It’s Janet, isn’t it?’ She frowned. ‘Have you been hiding her somewhere?’

Maisie ran forward and scooped up the muddy, bedraggled body of the gravedigging dog and said, ‘She’s my dog now. Mrs Macbeth gave her to me.’ Maisie pouted in a way that wasn’t very fetching and did her impression of a little girl, whereas in reality, as we all knew, she was a seventy-year-old woman trapped in the helpless body of a small child.

Mrs Dalzell didn’t look entirely convinced but she started to rally her flock and direct them towards the gates and the waiting minibus.

‘First stop Spandau,’ Mrs McCue said loudly as Mrs Dalzell snapped at her heels.

I followed them out of the cemetery, while Maisie pirouetted down the path. We were just in time to see Professor Cousins being herded onto the minibus. I shouted to him but he didn’t hear and it was Chick who hooked him by his thin elbow and steered him away.

‘If he goes in that place he’ll probably never get out again,’ he said to no-one in particular. Some bizarre sleight-of-hand then proceeded to take place whereby Janet was stuffed back in the shopping-basket and furtively returned to her rightful owner – Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth behaving throughout like rather poor amateur actors trying to recreate a Bond movie.

Chick looked at Maisie playing chalkless hopscotch in the rain. ‘I suppose you want taking home,’ he said gruffly to her, ‘whoever you are.’

‘Her name’s Lucy Lake,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully.

We got in the car and set off on the usual narrative detour – betting shops, off-licences, et cetera, even a rather lengthy sojourn for Professor Cousins and Chick in The Galleon Bar of the Tay Centre Hotel which Maisie and I preferred to sit out in the car, playing ‘Switch’ with Chick’s tasteless playing-cards.

Our route to Windsor Place took us past the university, now a hotbed of activity, people coming and going with a restless energy not hitherto witnessed on those premises. A crowd of people had gathered outside the Tower, from the fourth-floor balcony of which a bed sheet had been hung on which, in red paint that looked like blood (but presumably wasn’t), someone had written the words THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF DESTRUCTION.

‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Chick said, slowing down as a group of people spilled into the road. ‘Fucking students.’ Catching sight of Maisie in the rear-view mirror, he added, ‘excuse my French.’

‘I’ve heard worse,’ she said phlegmatically. ‘Look – there’s Dad,’ she exclaimed, pointing at a figure standing on the grass outside the Students’ Union. ‘Dad’ turned out to be Roger Lake – fired up, in oratorical mode, shouting and gesticulating for the benefit of a small group of students.

If Maisie carried on much longer with this charade she would forget who she was. ‘He’s not actually your father,’ I reminded her.

‘Really?’ Professor Cousins said to her. ‘And yet you look so much like him.’

I craned my neck to get a better view – she was right, it was Dr Dick on the stretcher. His carcass was wrapped in a red blanket that made him look even paler than usual, did indeed make him look rather dead. I got out of the car and went over to his limp form. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.

‘Do you know him?’ one of the ambulancemen asked.

‘Sort of,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘What happened to him? Was he injured in the demonstration?’

‘What demonstration?’ the ambulanceman said, looking round. He spotted the banner and read out, ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of destruction – what does that mean?’

The ambulanceman, although quite short, was young and had sandy hair and kind eyes and the capable manner of all men in uniform.

‘What does anything mean?’ I said, smiling at him. He smiled back.

‘Excuse me,’ Dr Dick said, struggling into a sitting position, ‘am I going to expire here in the street while you flirt with this . . .’ he struggled to find the right word, ‘this girl?’

The ambulanceman looked at Dr Dick and said mildly, ‘You seem lively enough for someone who’s expiring.’

‘A very professional diagnosis,’ Dr Dick said sulkily, flopping back onto the stretcher.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked him again. ‘Were you caught up in the protest?’

Dr Dick squinted at me unattractively. One of the lenses in his little academic spectacles had acquired a crack, giving him an oddly glaikit look. His eyelashes were pale and rather stubbly, like those of a pig. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. He seemed reluctant, however, to explain how he had ended up on the stretcher and it was the ambulanceman who finally told me that Dr Dick had slipped on an icy pavement and cracked his ankle bone. He grimaced, although I wasn’t sure whether this was from the pain in his ankle or the unheroic nature of his injury.

‘Thanks,’ Dr Dick said. He motioned me closer to him and hissed in my ear, ‘I think I was pushed. I think someone tried to kill me.’

‘Pushed off a pavement?’ I repeated incredulously. ‘Wouldn’t they have pushed you off something higher if they’d wanted to kill you?’

‘Hop in,’ the ambulanceman said to me. I hesitated.

‘Do. Please,’ Dr Dick said weakly.

I was trying to think of a good reason (although really I had several) not to go in the ambulance when Chick suddenly drove off in a great crashing of gears, hooting noisily as he overtook the ambulance.

‘What a tube,’ the ambulanceman said.

Maisie waved cheerfully at me as the car sped by. I recalled the image of the yellow dog being driven away in much the same manner and wondered what the chances were of Maisie arriving home.

‘Thank you,’ Dr Dick murmured to me, ‘you’re a good girl.’

‘What are you after today, Rita?’ Lolly said, wringing her hands together like a woman with a dreadful secret even though the expression on her face was one of extreme, almost excessive, cheerfulness.

‘Small white farmhouse, please,’ Madame Astarti said and then laughed and said, ‘maybe I should go to an estate agent’s for that?’ but Lolly just looked at her blankly with a fixed smile on her face.

‘Never mind,’ Madame Astarti sighed.

‘And a bit of a treat for elevenses?’ Lolly said, and together they conducted the ritual of surveying the trays of iced fancies and cream cakes.

‘Jam doughnut?’ Lolly said. ‘An Eccles cake?’ The thin strain of a slightly wobbly whistle could be heard coming from the back. It sounded to Madame Astarti like ‘Oh Mein Papa’. She’d never thought of it as a frightening tune before.

‘Chelsea bun?’ Lolly went on, a mad look on her face. ‘Chocolate eclair? Iced teacake? Cream puff?’

‘Excuse me,’ she said, her accent hard and tight, South African perhaps, or Rhodesian; ‘I wonder if you can help me – I’m looking for my daughter?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Effie.’

‘No, I’m Effie,’ I said. I was beginning to feel sick. It was too hot in the hospital, like an overheated greenhouse.

The woman laughed but in a strangled, off-key kind of way and it struck me that she might be insane.

I struggled to make sense of her. ‘You’re my mother’s sister, Effie? You’re dead,’ I added, rather impolitely.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not her sister.’ But then a nurse walked briskly up to me and said, ‘You can go in and see your dad now if you like.’

‘My dad?’ I repeated, bewildered. The woman began to walk away, her too-high heels stabbing the hospital linoleum. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after her but she had already pushed her way through the swing doors and disappeared.

I felt weak, as if I was going to faint. I was probably the one who ought to be admitted to a ward, not Dr Dick. (But who would I put as my next of kin? My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Her father is not her father. My father is not my father. My aunt is not my aunt. Et cetera.)

‘Cubicle three,’ the nurse said.

Of course I knew it was Dr Dick in cubicle three not my anonymous father choosing a bizarre location in which to come back from the dead, but for just a moment, as my hand went out to draw the curtain back, I felt a little shiver of excitement. If it was my father lying there what would I say to him? More importantly what would he say to me?

Dr Dick was examining the cast on his ankle. ‘I’m sure it’s not the only thing that’s broken,’ he complained without even looking at me, ‘and they wouldn’t listen when I told them I was tachycardic, they could at least have run an ECG. And I banged my head, how do they know I haven’t got concussion?’

‘Did you tell that nurse you were my father?’ I interrupted him.

‘Of course I didn’t,’ Dr Dick said indignantly. ‘I’m not even old enough to be your father, although I feel it,’ he added, lying back on his pillows. He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘My head hurts,’ he said again. I had to admit, he did look exhausted. I felt an unusual twinge of pity for him and reached out and clasped one of his hands in mine. He smelt of Savlon.

‘You’re a good girl,’ he murmured. Like all hypochondriacs, Dr Dick was distressed at finding he actually had something wrong with him and ended up making such a fuss (‘Is he often hysterical?’) that the junior house officer on duty decided it would be easier to keep him in overnight than it would be to persuade him to go home.

I was shooed away by a nurse with a bedpan who whisked the curtains around the bed with great theatricality as if she was about to perform a disappearing trick on Dr Dick. I hung about for a minute, unsure what to do until the nurse suddenly popped her head through the curtains and said, ‘This might take some time. Don’t worry,’ and then added, with routine cheerfulness, ‘we’ll take good care of your dad.’

It felt very late, although the clock in reception only said nine o’clock.

‘Bye,’ the receptionist said indifferently, ‘take care now.’

The snow was beginning to settle thickly and most of the traffic had stopped but I could just make out the yellow headlights of a car, moving slowly towards me along the Lochee Road. The car was almost obscured by the snow as it slewed to a gentle skidding halt on the other side of the road. It was a Wolseley Hornet. The driver’s window rolled down and Ferdinand’s handsome features resolved themselves out of the white kaleidoscope of snow.

‘Hop in,’ he said, in a curious echo of the ambulance-man earlier in the evening. Here was excellent good fortune.

The Hornet presented a perfect contrast to Chick’s Cortina. Its new-smelling interior was warm and its little engine chugged manfully through what was now a raging blizzard. It even had a tape-deck fitted on which John Martyn’s ‘Bless The Weather’ was, fittingly, playing.

Ferdinand seemed somewhat edgy. He hadn’t shaved recently, which made him look older and more dangerous. His eyes, I was relieved to see, were green and the dark hollows beneath them hinted at sleeplessness and the criminal in him seemed more evident than before. His navy-blue Guernsey, I noticed, was spiked with needles of coarse yellow dog hair. There was sand on the floor of the car and the slight brackish scent of the seaside that I knew only too well.

‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked. He sounded hoarse as if he had a sore throat and I offered him a Strepsil, which he declined.

‘So?’ Ferdinand asked, tapping his hand impatiently on the steering-wheel.

‘So?’ I repeated absently.

‘So where do you want to go?’

‘Anywhere.’

He gave me a funny look so I narrowed it down to Terri’s address in Cleghorn Street as we were already quite near there and it successfully removed the Bob factor from the me–Bob–Ferdinand equation.

As we drove, Ferdinand kept glancing warily in the rear-view mirror but there were no other vehicles on the road, even the buses had stopped running. I tried to make polite small talk with him although he seemed distinctly taciturn, if not downright moody. He did, however, finally volunteer the information that he was out prowling the streets looking for a dog.

‘Yellow mongrel, rather sanguine temperament?’ I hazarded.

‘How did you know that?’ he asked, looking at me in amazement. His eyes narrowed and his face grew menacing. ‘You’ve not been following me, have you?’

‘Of course not, Ferdinand,’ I said.

‘How do you know my name?’

A little further on, Ferdinand parked the car, rather carelessly, outside a shop that was still open on the City Road and said, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

Another car loomed out of the snow and glided to a silent stop behind the Hornet but no-one got out and the snow was too thick for me to see who was inside it.

I was just nodding off to sleep when Ferdinand came out of the shop, but hardly had he taken a step onto the snowy pavement when two men got out of the car behind and approached him. One of them said something to him that I couldn’t hear and then almost immediately the other one punched Ferdinand in the stomach. He doubled up in pain and fell to his knees. I opened the car door although I had no idea what I was going to do, they hardly seemed the type to respond to polite female remonstrance. But before I could make a move to get out of the car one of the men slammed the door shut again. My forehead bounced off the glass of the car window and I could feel a bruise start to form immediately.

The man leant down so that his face was close to the window. He grinned at me, showing rotten, crooked teeth, and then suddenly produced a knife, a huge hunting one that could have felled a bear, curved like a scimitar, with a serrated edge that glinted beneath the street light. He tapped this malevolently against the glass, grinning all the while like a storybook bandit. The message was clear and did not need words.

Then the men yanked Ferdinand to his feet, pulled his arms behind his back and bundled him into their car and drove off in a great flurry of snow, skidding round the corner onto Milnbank Road and disappearing from view.

This wasn’t going at all well. I sat for a while waiting for my pulse to slow a little, worried my heart was about to give up. I wasn’t sure what to do next – reporting the incident to the police was the first thing that came to mind but I wouldn’t get very far if I tried to walk in this weather, and I certainly wouldn’t make it as far as the police station in Bell Street without succumbing to hypothermia. The car probably wouldn’t make it either, as the whole world had now turned white and anyway I hadn’t driven a car since taking lessons in Bob’s ill-fated old Riley 1.5 (a tale that still doesn’t need telling).

‘Robbery?’

The policeman nodded towards the shop which was once more brightly lit and open for business. The owner was standing on the doorstep and observing my predicament with satisfaction.

The other policeman looked at his watch and said, ‘Night in the cells for you, I’m afraid,’ and started up his engine and—